Links relevant to this article :

The Forest
Collage of Forest II Beers
Mike's Demo Reel 2007/08

We also released a teaser Trailer for The Forest II, during Christmas 2006. You can watch that trailer on Stage6 here, or on YouTube here.

About The Forest Part 2: Relentless Thirst

In December of 2004, we showed The Forest to our friends at a private premiere. Shortly after this, we put it up online for the whole world to see. Because of the positive reaction to the film,. we instantly started to think about the possibility of a sequel. Our success in entering the FACT Liverpool Film Night several months later only served to increase the desire for another go. Despite the difficulties in getting the film done, at the core of it all was a simple "relentless thirst" to create - a thirst that is not slaked for long.

An unquenchable thirst...

Writing

Liam and his good friend Craig Lipski penned a draft script, along with images, as the basis for the film. Meanwhile, Mike also penned a script of his own. Upon reviewing each other's scripts, it was almost certain that the project would be scrapped - with Liam's having dropped most of the deadpan aspect that made the first film what it was, and Mike having taken the deadpan and frivolous visual effects to a level where there was little funny about it at all. Thankfully, after some thinking time, Liam and Mike finally penned an amalgamation of their two scripts - keeping the opening scene from Mike's, the main storyline from Liam's, and completely rewriting the dialogue. There were some continuity issues inherited from the first film - most notably the fact that Mike had lost an arm. After toying with the idea of either removing the arm in post or having Mike conceal it throughout filming, we eventually decided that he would have acquired a conveniently sophisticated prosthetic in the time between the two films. Having the talented Lord Pablo back on board as our CGI artist meant that we knew this was definitely achievable.

Storyboarding

Unlike our previous projects, we decided that The Forest II was going to be entirely storyboarded so that we would know exactly what we needed when we got to our locations to shoot. This proved to be a vital step in getting the work done on time. The storyboarding was completed during a four or five month phase, from April to August, 2005. A large pad of A2 paper was used, with Mike, Liam and occasionally Simon working out camera angles and movements. Many creative arguments were worked out at this phase, which meant less conflict and less time-consuming creative decision making when out shooting.

Props, Equipment and Costumes

Unlike the first film, the advance planning meant that we had a whole list of items to create or acquire before we could go out and begin the shoot. Liam filled a cheap plastic BB gun with pennies and painted it black to create his new G36 assault rifle. He also used a toy pistol to create the grenade launcher. Mike bought a heavier metal BB shotgun as his new weapon. Both of these were significantly more realistic than the obvious toys that were used in the first film.

The hardware

Mike's robotic arm, while serving no real purpose in the plot, was an important dramatic opener for the film. Although for the parts where the arm would be visible would be a CGI effect created by Paul, for most of the film the arm is concealed underneath an arm sock and glove. The arm sock was stitched by Paul, and adorned with imitation leather and metal buttons. The glove was a thick leather biker's glove.

A "Shaft of Cadaver" signpost was constructed by Dr Wombat and Fish Wizard from old wood and black paint, and was weathered by Sophie Madge, Simon's girlfriend.

The Shaft of Cadaver sign, created by Wombat and Fish

For the main costumes, we decided to stick with the style set out in the last film - white t-shirt and blue jeans for Mike, black t-shirt and dark jeans for Liam. Simon's loincloth was reconstructed using a similar material to that used in the first film. The same duffel bag from the first film was used again. We also created two Brewfix t-shirts using iron-on printed designs, and Paul and Liam stitched together The Original Simon's costume.

As far as filming hardware goes, we used a JVC GR-DV700EK mini DV camera - a similar model to the one used to create the first film. Due to the large amount of visual effects and therefore time that this film took, and the now readily-available HD format, we have decided that The Forest II is that last film of any appreciable scale that we will shoot at standard definition. A three-metre track dolly was constructed by Tony Comerford, who was also our chief camera operator throughout filming. A Senheisser DV microphone was purchased for it's excellent sound quality. Some cheap 500W halogen lights were used to illuminate the indoor and Simon's Shack scenes and to generate lightning effects in the opening of the film Along with a fairly standard tripod, this combination was our film-making kit.

Simon - in his warming dressing gown - tests the track dolly

Filming

The Forest II was shot in three very distinct segments, along with a fourth for pickups. The first was the week-long location shoot that was completed in April 2006. This was filmed in and around Cotton Dell, Staffordshire, England. The purpose of this phase was to film all of the "In the forest" footage, as well as some pieces for the Simon's Shack flashbacks.

The Location Shoot

On the weekend before principal photography was due to begin, location scouting was completed for all of the major scenes that needed to be filmed. Although it is hopefully not obvious, a lot of the film was shot in the very same locations as the first film, with some extra areas thrown into the mix to give it a grander scale.

On the first day that principal photography was due to start, it snowed! It was quite difficult to believe - England gets very little snow overall, especially not in early spring. We decided to leave it another day, and start again on the Tuesday.

Chief cameraman Tony sets up a low tripod shot

There was still snow on the ground when we went out to take our first shot - and Simon had to fall over in it. Perhaps unfairly, this very first shot, which involved Simon running uphill a large number of times and falling over whilst practically naked into freezing snow, was cut from the final film because by the end of the day the snow had entirely thawed.

During the week, we made a brief visit to a scrap yard in Stoke-On-Trent, who were kind enough to provide us with an old van and allowed us to paint on the side of it. We used bluescreens to isolate the scrap yard background, which was ultimately easier than moving a complete vehicle to the forest location.

The van shoot on location at a scrap yard in Stoke-on-Trent

At various stages of the location shoot, we used light probes - a reflective chrome christmas tree decoration and another grey spraypainted one - to sample the light in a given area. This was useful in constructing lighting for the various CGI elements that would be added to the shot later on.

One of many "lightprobe" pictures taken - the reflection of Tony was paintbrushed out before use as a light reference.

Although at times we were pessimistic, we managed to get through all the filming we intended to during our week-long stint. Although often very arduous and stressful, the week was very rewarding, and many involved have often said how they miss filming once it's done.

The Indoor Shoot

In November of 2006, it was finally time to film the second large block of filming - the indoor scenes. This was everything in the film from the start until Mike and Liam enter the forest, as well as the end scene - about six minutes all told. The scenes were shot over a weekend, with Mike traveling back to Liverpool from Middlesbrough to get the filming complete. The scenes themselves were relatively straightforward, requiring nothing more complicated than a track dolly. The most difficult shot to film was easily the opening long dolly around the room with Mike and Liam sat down - it required three additional crew members (one for the dolly, one for the camera, and one to hold the microphone). Once again, light probe references were taken for the CGI arm that would be inserted into several shots.

A shot from the "indoor scene"

For the indoor scenes, we decided that we weren't going to be giving any free product placement to alcohol firms this time around - instead, we designed and created several of our own brands of beer - a collage of which can be seen here.

Wombat's Tail, Essence of DoDo, Lord Pablo's Imperial Mild... all tasty beverages

Simon's Shack

Quite an exciting prospect for us was the opportunity to construct and film on a full set, made specifically for the film. In all of our previous works, the actual locations for shooting, whether indoors or out, were always pre-existing locations and places. Simon's Shack allowed us to let our imaginations run wild and create a place with character from scratch. The Simon's Shack scene was filmed in early February, 2007.

The set was almost entirely constructed by Liam and Paul over the course of a week. At the time, they were living in a large house in Liverpool, and temporarily converted the lounge into the Simon's Shack set. Hessian material was suspended from the walls and ceiling. The door was jammed open, and a fake prop door made of sticks and the same hessian material was put in it's place. The "walls" were decorated with paint, and an armchair and straw chair were covered with sticks and string to make it look as if it had been constructed from forest findings. An oil lamp, additional sticks and wool rugs finished the effect - it was lit with two vertical uplighters and a bright lamp, along with a red lamp from the front to suggest a fire in the invisible fourth wall.

Liam sits in Simon's chair

Simon came up with The Original Simon's distinctive droll tones by himself. He was scripted to essentially be another Mike and Liam - another low-talking Max Payne clone. Thankfully, Simon excelled himself and really brought the character to life that evening. This makes the SImon's Shack scene memorable on it's character acting alone.

The Original Simon

Filming for the Simon's Shack scene took place at night, to eliminate uneven lighting problems caused by the lounge windows. With filming commencing at around 9 PM and finishing at around 5 AM, it was another stressful and difficult shoot, but we got through it and once we saw the cut put together it all seemed worthwhile.

Pickup shots

Although we had done our best to follow the storyboards closely and accurately, it was inevitable that there were some editing holes that needed covering up, some plot points that needed clarifying, and some later ideas that needed realising. Pickups began in August 2007, with the Mike and Liam approach to the forest, Simon's night-time flashbacks (which were impossible to "day-for-night" in the original footage), and some additional clarification shots for the death scene. The pickups continued almost until the finishing date. Additional elements that were shot included the effects plates for the impalement, smoke against a black background for various uses, and the reshooting of one of the van shots against a bluescreen because the original plate was overexposed - this is detailed below.

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From left to right - the original plate shot in April 2006 was overexposed, but it was impossible to go back and reshoot at the original scrap yard location. So, when it was time for pickups in September 2007, Mike was shot against bluescreen doing the same action. On the right is the final shot, with a background reconstructed in Photoshop from various correctly-exposed still frames of the original van shoot.

There were also some originally scripted scenes that were not filmed until quite late in the development cycle - the most prominent being the "Simon's bedsit" shots, which depicted the original simon in a depressed state in a lonely bedsit, watching the television and hearing about the effects his clones are having on the forest. This was shot in the kitchen of Liam's newer house in Liverpool, with a blank television ready for visual effects. The news report itself, which stars our cameraman Tony, was filmed at a later date in November.

Editing

The editing process was not entirely complete until near the completion date of the film. This was mostly due to the extra time it took to acquire the pickup material. The edit itself went smoothly, using Adobe Premiere Pro,. in part because we had our storyboards to refer to. At this stage several scenes were trimmed or cut for time - several clone shots were scrapped due to their length and lack of integration with their surrounding shots, and some scenes were trimmed down to their bare minimum - a good example of this would be the van scene, which was scripted and storyboarded to be much longer than it appears in the final film

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The "approach to the forest" scenes were amongst the reshoots started in August 2007, which meant the final edit was not locked 'til late in the development cycle

A scene from the indoor shoot, which depicted Liam telephoning the Brewfix company to order our beer, was almost entirely removed because it was not as funny as originally intended. The scene was nearly a minute long and had very little exposition to move the story along. It's only presence in the film now is in a second-long shot during the "montage" scene, just to ensure that the viewer knew we had ordered beer from Brewfix.

Visual Effects

The visual effects in The Forest II are far and above anything we had attempted in any previous film. Our interest in visual effects began in 2004 with Boxmobiles, and continued with The Forest. For The Forest II, we decided that we wanted to push it much much further - so did our best not to let ourselves be limited with what we thought we could and could not do.

We scripted shots that required huge explosions, CGI hands and digital doubles for all three of the main actors. We made our clone shots more complex by including more overlapping and interaction, as well as attempting three cloning shots with a moving camera. We had Liam being impaled on a Simon's arm. We had a computer generated shack in the woods. It's no wonder that the visual effects for The Forest II took so much time to complete!

The CGI arm animation in the works

Visual effects work began almost immediately upon completion of the week-long location shoot. Probably the first shot to be worked on - and one of the last to be completed - was the shot of Simon getting blasted back by the shotgun. The original plate had Simon suspended from a tree by a rope, and the intention was to animate him flying backwards. Footage from the original shoot can be seen in our blooper reel. While relatively easy to complete, this looked laughably fake - so in the end, Simon was replaced with a CGI version of himself for this shot.

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From left to right - the original bluescreen plate, which had Simon on a harness and was frankly hilarious. In the middle - the first crack at the shot, animation and motion-blurring the bluescreen plate from left to right - hmm, not very convincing. On the right - the final shot, using Paul's physics-driven CGI Simon double. Much better!

While the amount of CGI and complicated composites increased in number exponentially from the first film, there was still plenty of room left for some good old fashioned cloning. Once again, while Mike handled all of the compositing and some of the cloning shots, the brunt of the clone rotoscoping work was handled by Liam. Liam devised a time-saving technique that did not entirely isolate Simon, but also incorporated parts of the background plate as well. This meant that intricate rotoscoping only needed to be done on areas where Simons overlap one another.

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Roto roto roto roto roto roto roto roto roto roto roto roto roto roto roto roto.......

There were three shots in the film that were particularly worrisome to us - they would require CGI doubles of all three main actors. Since it was physically impossible to hurl Simon 15 feet in the air and undeniably insane to throw ourselves off a cliff, we decided to once again utilise the talents of Paul. Reference pictures were taken, and Paul modeled the doubles completely from scratch using 3D Studio Max. By rigging them to a skeleton and putting them through a "ragdoll" physics simulation, he was able to get realistic movement from the limp forms. Subsurface scattering shaders were used to realistically mimic skin, and hair simulations were used (with some difficulty) to simulate Simon's long hair. Mike composited the doubles together with the live-action, and with additional particles, colour correction and film grain, the effect was complete.

There were a good number of "invisible effects" spread throughout the film. A short closeup of the shotgun being removed from the cabinet was altered to make it look slightly more professional - it was created simply with black tape, which worked fine in wider shots - but in extreme closeup, something a little more detailed was required. The most complex "invisible effect" occurred In the van scene. The Brewfix logo we painted onto the van was not to our liking, so the original photoshop-designed logo was tracked back in over the top of it, and rotoscoping was used to ensure Liam did not obscure it. Extensive use of digital stabilisation was used throughout the film to even out some of the bumpiness in handheld shots.

Left - the original, very tapey, shot. Right - the final version which looks better on a closeup.

The Forest II was sufficiently large in scope that once our self-imposed deadline loomed on the horizon, we called in extra artists to help on some shots. Matte painter Nick Marshall created a beautiful landscape and a snow-obscured forest for use in Simon's flashback,, 3D modeler Jem Alexander created a shotgun model for use in the CGI double shots, and compositor Terry Marriott did a small amount of rotoscoping to the shot of Simon escaping during the flashback.

Simon Returns - Matte painting by Nick Marshall - rotoscoping, compositing and grading by Mike

A good deal of some of the more complicated effects are detailed in Mike's 2007-08 demo reel, which is currently hosted on Stage6. We used a large amount of stock footage from the Detonation Films site throughout the post process.

Sound

Given the higher level of production values throughout, it was only fitting that we put more time into the sound design for The Forest II. Although we had taken our time to use a high-quality microphone during scenes that had dialogue, quite a lot of the indoor and Simon's Shack scenes required dubbing to fix small audio problems. In particular, Simon recorded his voice-over work for the Shack at least three times - the issue here was not audio clarity, but the tone and inflection of his voice to fit the editing. Thankfully Simon is a patient man and did not object to this (much).

Foley - background sounds such as footsteps, doors and the like - was completed during the last week before the premiere. Whilst Liam was in charge of the audio mix, Mike recorded a good proportion of the foley himself with the aid of Wombat and DoDo. Throwing themselves onto piles of leaves, stirring up a lake with a stick, and deliberately stumbling off a wall must have made Mike and his assistants an intriguing sight to the residents of suburban Liverpool.

An excellent piece of freeware called Audacity was used for audio cleanup

Once foley elements were recorded, they were cleaned up using a fantastic freeware program called Audacity - volume levels were tweaked, and background noise was removed with a filter. These were then dropped into the sound timeline in Adobe Premiere.

Certain sound elements were retained from the in-camera recording - a good example is the rather satisfying noise that the balloon of fake blood made when burst by Simon's hand. This was used at two or three points throughout the film where flesh is crunched. An invaluable resource, especially when the deadline was imminent, was the Freesound Project, which provided us with a huge database of sound effects to use.

Music

As in the first film, it was always our intention to create our own music for The Forest II. Once again, Liam took the lead here, learning a music creation program called Fruity Loops. This was used to generate all of the music in the film - ranging from the classically-inspired "epic music" of the "Simon Returns to the Forest" shot, to the guitar-heavy action music. The distinctive "Forest riff", that Liam had created for the first film, was extensively utilised again - exploding into action as the grenade does. The "healing" music was heavily influenced by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - to mirror the scene that ours references.

Below is a list of the ten tracks that The Forest II music was composed from. We have provided free downloads for each.

Downloads for The Forest II music

1 - Drank The Beers
2 - Montage
3 - In The Forest
4 - Action
5 - Death
6 - Resurrection
7 - Storytime
8 - Unnatural Urge
9 - Monsters
10 - One Simon Yet

It was important for us to equate certain parts of the second film to the first, be that visually or musically. This was because we very much wanted the two to feel thematically similar - it could even be argued that the second film is basically another attempt at the first. Obvious examples include the montage sequence at the end of the indoor scenes - the new music is a slower, more bassy version of the original. The "victory" music from the first film returns, again at the climax of the "action" segment of the film. It is another example of the Forest riff used in a slightly different way.

The music was created almost entirely by Liam, with only opinions and ideas from Mike and Paul. One small exception to this would be the death scene and it's immediate aftermath, which was envisaged by Mike. Being unable to read music, Mike did his best to play on a piano/hum out the tunes he had in his head, and let Liam interpret the best he could. He did a remarkable job!

Premiere

Mere hours before we were due to show our film using a self-mode projection screen and our own projector, the venue that we had booked several weeks in advance decided to cancel on us. This happened at 10 in the evening on December 14th - to say we were upset is an understatement. However, times of great need often prove the most fruitful - and after an hour of frenzied phone calls to various places in Liverpool, we managed to book some time at MODO Liverpool, who already had their own projector screen and a larger space than our original venue. We are eternally grateful to MODO for giving us their venue at such short notice, and for opening up their downstairs bar to prevent our guests from going thirsty.

Setting up for the premiere at MODO Liverpool

Roughly 50 people attended the premiere, at 4 PM. It was originally planned as a "Double Bill" event, to premiere alongside DoDo's SUpermansch III. However, DoDo did not manage to finish his film in time, and The Forest premiered alone. After two minutes, the laptop which we were using to play our film from lost power, because we had neglected to plug it in - a particularly embarrassing turn of events, since we had vowed to ensure this exact turn of events did not occur. Still, after a few moments the laptop was rebooted and the film played in its entirety.

We were very pleased that the film was well-received with its premiere audience, and were therefore very excited about getting the film up onto the internet to show to the masses. This happened on December 18th, exactly three years to the day that the first Forest film was shown to its first audience.

What next?

The Forest II has been a fantastic learning experience and a pleasure to work on. We are currently in the process of entering it into several film festivals and competitions - keep your eye on the front page for news on these. A DVD is also in the works, which will be available upon special request (a case of sending us a blank DVD and enough money to cover postage and printing costs) or via an ISO torrent.

It's inevitable - there is going to be a Forest III, but give it a year or two for us to do other stuff first.